Achievement of increasing in storage capacity of storage media such as optical disks or hard dicks has made it possible to store a great number of music contents in a storage medium. A playback apparatus is available which is adapted to play music contents stored on such a high-capacity storage medium.
In conventional music content playback apparatuses, a user selects a music content from a large number of music contents and performs an operation to play the selected music content.
A system is also known which is adapted to determine candidates for music contents on the basis of a music content playback history of a user and present the candidates to the user (see, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2003-173350).
In the conventional techniques, as described above, a user selects a music content to be played, or an apparatus selects candidates for music contents to be played on the basis of a playback history and presents the selected candidates to the user. However, in the conventional music content playback apparatus, a music content selected in the above-described manner is simply played back in a manner intended by a music content producer, and there is no playback apparatus adapted to play a music content in a manner modified according to a preference of a user.
That is, a music content produced by a producer or an artist is allowed to be played back by a music content playback apparatus only in a manner originally intended by the producer, partially because of a limitation in capabilities of the music content playback apparatus.
If it is allowed to reconstruct a music content, for example, by changing the tempo or the key or mixing a piece of music with another piece of music, thereby arranging the music content into a desired style such as a classic style, a jazz style, a hip-hop style, etc., in a similar manner to that performed by a disk jockey, according to a preference of a listener (hereinafter also referred to as a user), the listener can enjoy listening to music much more.
In view of the above, it is an object of the present invention to provide a technique that allows a user to reconstruct (arrange) a music content into a desired form and enjoy listening to the music content played back in the arranged form.